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These Senate Democrats Broke The Blockade Of Fast Track

As promised, here is the list of Democratic senators who joined Republicans to break the filibuster of fast track trade promotion authority. Fast track essentially preapproves the Trans-Pacific Partnership before the pubic gets a chance to know what is in it. As I wrote Thursday, this is “for your phone calls and your ‘long memory’ list.”

The second insidious element of this [lobbying] is that it has created extremely lucrative post-political opportunities for members of Congress and staff. It used to be that a member of Congress, once they were defeated or were retired, they’d go home or they would just simply literally retire and do nothing. But now, they have all these opportunities to make huge amounts of income as lobbyists. I think it’s changed the nature of being in Congress.

When I first started working on Capitol Hill, it was sort of generally understood that a member of Congress would stay pretty much forever … and it was very common for staff people to stay on Capitol Hill for their entire careers. I think that’s very rare these days. Now, they come, they get their ticket stamped, and then they move on and become lobbyists and make a lot more money — and do a lot less work. So, I can’t prove it, but I honestly think that there are people who run for Congress now not because they actually want to be in Congress, but because they actually want to be lobbyists, and so they want that credential that allows them to get the job that they want.

Do you think they see lobbying as basically a reward they’ve earned from working on Capitol Hill?

Well, yes, and not only that. I learned this from Jack Abramoff: he would go to … Congressional staffers and basically say, Look, if you do this favor for me, there’s a guaranteed job for you the day you decide to leave Capitol Hill. I don’t know if that’s literally bribery, but it certainly borders on it … This was a revelation to me, because that was never the case when I worked on Capitol Hill. But now, I think that people do understand that these options are there and it does encourage them to push the limits of what might be legally or ethically justifiable.

Let me add a footnote to this, one of the things about lobbying that I never see anybody report on, but it is extremely insidious.

Sure, go ahead. What is it?

The employment of spouses and children of members of Congress [in lobbying firms]. Now this information has to be disclosed on their financial disclosure forms, but I’m not aware of anybody who collects it and analyzes it systematically. It’s very common for the wife or husband of some member of Congress to get a job at some lobbying company or some government relations office — and, frankly, a lot of times these jobs are not real jobs. These people are not being hired for their expertise. They’re hired simply to ingratiate the business with the member of Congress and to create a very opportunities for de facto lobbying through the normal, social things that go on in any business. This is very very common, I’m afraid. For some reason it just seems to be off-limits for people to complain about it.

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Another scathing indictment of the way Washington does business, with even the former “reformer” who pledged to end all this (said to a loud chorus of cheers and thundering applause) now revealed at the center of the skulduggery.

I know that campaign finance reform literally requires at minimum an Act of Congress to change, if not a Constitutional Amendment. But what are the options for choking the lobbying beast that is consuming both the legislative and more and more the executive branches? I am mystified at what would fix it.